Monday, December 09, 2013

"I often joke that the only way to get
published in Britain if you're French is to pretend you're Spanish. If
you've been a best-seller in France, it's a sure-fire recipe for not
getting a deal in the UK. "As for US publishers, they're so convinced that with 350
million potential readers and a big stable of American writers, they've
got everything covered - every genre, every style. So why bother?" The costs and difficulty of literary translation are clearly
part of the problem. So too is the fact that the Anglophone book market
is thriving - so the demand for foreign works is limited. Some French authors are critical of Anglo-Saxon "complacency".
...
"Personally I am fed up with all the stereotypes," says Darieussecq.
"We're not intellectual. We're not obsessed with words. We write
detective stories. We write suspense. We write romance.
"And it's about time you started noticing."

About the middle of October, a number of news organization websites
started to see huge numbers of visitors flowing from Facebook.
Buzzfeed’s Charlie Warzel reported that Buzzfeed and its partner sites had seen traffic from Facebook surge 69 percent between August and October.
The change wasn’t out of nowhere. In August, a Facebook corporate blog post hinted
that the algorithm that controlled the site’s News Feed was changing
slightly, such that “stories that people did not scroll down far enough
to see can reappear near the top […] if the stories are still getting
lots of likes and comments.”
It sounds like a little change, but it’s hard to overstate the
importance of the News Feed. The feed is what you see when you log into Facebook.com;
it’s essentially the homepage of the site, and it changes for every
user. What dictates how it looks is the elusive News Feed algorithm, a
program that decides not only which statuses, photos, and news stories
should display, but how many of each there will be. And a traffic jump
of the size Warzel reported could only come with a change in the News
Feed algorithm.
...Enter Upworthy. Simultaneous to this traffic upheaval, an entire vocabulary and syntax for headlines that people click and share—and oh, boy, do they click and share—had
presented itself on the social web. For publishers trying to grab more
traffic from Facebook, the path became clear. Borrow, adapt, employ the
Upworthy style post haste. Assure readers your content was nothing but wondtacular. And so began the wondtacularization.

The research presented on Thursday was perhaps best
summarized by research conducted by the University of Pennsylvania
Graduate School of Education, which analyzed the study habits of 1
million students across 16 Coursera courses between June of 2012 and
2013. “Emerging data ... show that massive open online courses
(MOOCs) have relatively few active users, that user ‘engagement’ falls
off dramatically especially after the first 1-2 weeks of a course, and
that few users persist to the course end,” a summary of the study reads. For anyone who has paid even the slightest bit of attention
to the MOOC space over the past year, those conclusions hardly qualify
as revelations. Yet some presenters said they felt the first day of the
conference served as an opportunity to confirm some of those commonly
held beliefs about MOOCs.

Publishers have long bemoaned Africa's lack of a "book culture" but some hope that the advent of smartphones and the internet could help change this, writes journalist Chris Matthews. The 566% increase in worldwide internet usage since the start of the millennium might appear staggering but not when compared with Africa, where online activity has grown by an astonishing 3,606%. More than 160 million people are now connected throughout the continent, mostly on mobile phones. With internet access surging and connectivity increasing, the doors are being thrown open to digital publishing. All of which suggests a new chapter has been started since Kenyan publisher Henry Chakava's withering attack on Africa's book culture back in 1997.

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Michael Cairns

I enjoy discussing the publishing industry and in particular the changes that impact the business. On PND, I don't write about everything, just the things that interest me.

My career spans a wide range of publishing and information products, services and B2B categories and my operating and consulting experience has largely been with brand-name companies such as PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Macmillan, Inc., Berlitz International, AARP, R.R. Bowker and Wolters Kluwer.

I have served as a board member of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and in addition to my responsibilities at R.R. Bowker, l also served as Chairman of the International ISBN Executive Committee.